"I just wish everyone would finally stick to one standard for these things and be done with it rather than making a proprietary system everytime that gets junked when demand for the pods runs short making the devices useless."
The problem is the market. No, not the coffee market. The financial market. More specifically, the stock brokers and financial people who influence the value of shares with the sales and purchases every time the wind changes direction. Some analyst says a company A will make $500m profit. Company A then actually reports "only" $400m profit. Shares up or down? Well obviously they "failed", so the shares go down. This means a company who are on the stock market are not only under immense pressure to grow and return more "value" for share holders, but they are under even more pressure to outperform some analysts market predictions that he pulled out of his arse not unlike certain coffee beans but more smelly.
So, even if you make a healthy profit and have decent growth, you can still fail if you don't meet market expectations. So no company can afford to look the other way when there's the chance to lock in consumers because if they don't do it, someone else will, and that someone else might succeed.
This why a simple, basic, cheap espresso machine is so hard to come by. No one wants to be the one selling last years model. And the new model has to be bigger, better, brasher and have more features. And cost more. And be different. And use "special" pods/capsules/whatever. (s/coffee machine/any gadget/)
My favourite espresso machine was the first one I bought. £20 in Woolworths. Really small foot print and you got out as much coffee as water you put in (less some used for steam if you wanted frothy coffee). Now they all have tanks and pumps and barely enough pressure to make frothy milk. and you can't get a reasonable one for under £50. And they are bigger.
TL;DR. Capitalist bastards destroyed the coffee machine industry :-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
